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Avera Institute for Human Genetics

The Avera Institute for Human Genetics has expanded its research on personalizing medicine, the process of customizing health care or medical treatment specific to an individual’s needs. The Avera Institute for Human Genetics (AIHG) and Avera Research Institute (ARI) currently have active protocols for research projects investigating the benefit of pharmacogenomics in treating patients.

Pharmacogenomics, the study of how an individual’s genetic make-up affects how that individual will respond to medications, is one of the most important components of personalized medicine and provides physicians a tool to help them make predictions on drug effectiveness, optimal dose and potential adverse reactions, individualized to the patient. Current personalized medicine projects utilize pharmacogenomics for pain manage­ment, medication effectiveness, and ADHD treatment. The team at the Avera Institute for Human Genetics has had multiple manuscripts published in both national and international journals, furthering their genetics research.

Located in Sioux Falls, S.D., the AIHG laboratory is a fully-equipped state-of-the-art human molecular genetics laboratory with the capability to undertake a wide range of research projects from small scale pilot candidate gene projects to large scale high throughput genome-wide association studies on tens of thousands of samples.

The AIHG scientific lab is a modern laboratory and workstation space housing cutting-edge genetics laboratory equipment enabling researchers to describe a patient's genetic profile, for example, the GeneChip Instrumentation System from Affymetrix, and DNA Sequencer from Applied Biosystems.